I see so many people struggling with chronic pain in the back, neck, shoulders, knees, hips. The pain tends to rule their lives. It’s the first thing they think about when they wake up in the morning: And it’s the last thing they think about when they go to bed at night.
I know. I’ve been there. I’ve been a back-pain sufferer. But it doesn’t have to be this way. There is a way out of chronic pain. I also know this because I’ve done that, too. I’ve gotten out of pain.
In the early 90’s, I was young, married and had a good job. Everything seemed to be going along perfectly, except for the fact that I began to experience back pain. This went on for a while and I began to seek various treatments for help.
My doctor told me I had a herniated disc and spinal stenosis. I thought stenosis was something old people got. But what about the herniated disc? What my doctor didn’t tell me then and most doctors still won’t tell you now is that practically everyone over the age of 20 has a herniated disc in their lower lumbar spine. And not everyone who has a herniated disc feels any pain. I’ve since learned that a herniated disc is a finding, not a cause of back pain. It is also a benign sign of aging.
That diagnosis started a whole round of treatments. I tried physical therapy where they told me I had week abs. That was the first thing that made me doubt what was going on. If my abs were weak, (I was 25 or so at the time, I was very active and athletic and I had a visible 6-pack) how much stronger would they have to be? Physical therapy didn’t work although I enjoyed the work out.
My physical therapist gave me a tens unit (electrical stimulation at the site of the pain, to relieve it? Distract me from it?) They tried ice and heat. None of that worked.
I tried acupuncture. I also liked that treatment, but it didn’t relieve the pain.
I wore a back brace. I’m not sure what that did, but it was uncomfortable.
I was taking 4 advil 4 times a day. My stomach was not happy, but 2 advil did nothing; at least 4 seemed to help for a while.
I went to an orthopedic surgeon. I remember sitting in his office crying with the pain. I begged him to operate on me to relieve the pain. He refused. When I asked him why he told me that while he didn’t doubt the severity of my pain, I was still going to work and doing things. He told me to call him when I couldn’t get out of bed. Thank god he didn’t operate on me when I was so willing and vulnerable. Maybe he knew that surgery wasn’t guaranteed to relieve back pain and I was so young at the time. What would happen to me as I got older?
I had started doing yoga back in the 80’s and was very interested in health and well-being. Maybe yoga was going to help with my back pain. I also read lots of books on health and healing. One of the books that I read was Dr. Andrew Weil’s book: Spontaneous Healing. In it he mentioned how he believed that there was a psychological and emotional component to back pain. He wrote about a doctor, John E. Sarno in New York City, who was curing people from chronic back pain. He recommended reading Dr. Sarno’s book: Healing Back Pain. I bought the book and read it. At the time, I wasn’t impressed. It seemed like just another self-help book.
Sometime later, I was home recuperating from an abdominal surgery. I had endometriosis and needed to have some blood clots removed from my abdomen. I read every book on my bedside table and needed something else to read when I picked up Dr. Sarno’s book again. For whatever reason, this time the book really spoke to me.
Dr. Sarno taught that chronic pain was a coping mechanism for dealing with unwanted emotions. He stated that if you broke the largest bone in your body, the femur bone, that it would take 8 to 12 weeks to heal and that once healed it would be better, even stronger than before. He said that it wasn’t physically possible to have pain for 2 or 10 or even 20 years after an injury. If there was chronic pain, it was due to a psychological, emotional need and conditioning. He felt that human beings did not go through the evolutionary process to end up with fragile spines. He also taught that herniated discs were benign symptoms of the aging process. He also taught that everyone had some kind of trauma in their lives.
He also pointed out some common personality traits that he found were more common with people who suffered with back pain. Some of these traits are: goodism, people pleasing, perfectionism, procrastination, low self-confidence, stoicism, wanting to be right, anxiety, fear, and dependency.
Dr Sarno (who retired in 2012 and died in 2017) was practicing in New York City at the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitative medicine. I was living in Philly at the time and it was a short train ride to Manhattan. I decided that I needed to go see him. I was so glad I did! That visit cured me of my back pain.
Dr. Sarno worked in rehabilitative medicine for 50 years. He had a lot of experience working with people who had chronic pain and he observed who got better and who didn’t. He was a pioneer in his field. Although his ideas were not, and are still not main stream, his work has been picked up by other doctors; some of whom were cured by Dr. Sarno’s techniques themselves.
I will go into more of my story more in another blog post. This one is already at 1,000 words and long enough.
At this point, you are either not interested and stopped reading long ago, or you are still with me and are intrigued and want to learn more. If you are interested, this would be a good time to pick up one of Dr. Sarno’s books. In his books you will learn the meaning of TMS (Tension Myositis Syndrome), how it is caused and how it can be cured. See my post on recommended resources.